Library Notes: Stories upon stories

Friday

Dec 20, 2013 at 8:13 AM

I am a repository of secrets. One is a "let the earth open up and swallow me whole" mortifying, blush-inducing, insane thing from my college past that no amount of holiday merriment could pry loose from its mental dungeon (only my partner knows this thing which is, I think, the truest possible testament to our love there could be.)

I am a repository of secrets. One is a "let the earth open up and swallow me whole" mortifying, blush-inducing, insane thing from my college past that no amount of holiday merriment could pry loose from its mental dungeon (only my partner knows this thing which is, I think, the truest possible testament to our love there could be.)

Other secrets live just under my skin and are less secrets than closely held personal facts — the small juxtaposed with the big, the mundane with the utterly life-changing: No, I never learned the art of bike riding (a major source of embarrassment when I was young.) Yes, I have wet my pants and pretended it was spilled water (obviously I hadn’t yet figured out the concept of "ammonia"). Yes, my father died four days before my seventh birthday. Yes, my college friend and lover committed suicide just weeks before his own birthday and graduation;. No, I am not the sort of person that believes time heals all wounds.

When I was a kid, two of my most treasured books were "Matilda" and "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler." Both stories are pretty adventurous: Roald Dahl’s Matilda develops the psychic ability to move objects with her mind, a talent she puts to great (and hilarious) use against her school’s tyrannical headmistress, while E. L. Konigsburg’s Claudia Kincaid protests the monotony in her life by running away — with younger brother in tow — from her Greenwich, Conn., home to New York City, where the pair hide for several days in the famous Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Though my young life generally lacked any great excitement (of the fun sort, at least, or whatever kind it is that involves running away and sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s bed), it wasn’t the fun and adventure that spoke to me in these books. It was the deep, critical thought each girl devoted to her problems. It was the power each claimed and exerted over lives in which they were initially powerless, and the comfort they sought and cherished. (This makes these books sound boring. They’re not. Read them both.) My childhood was not comfortable, and I was not in control; these girls weren’t heroes to me — they were just other kids around my age who might get it.

And then there’s Katherine Paterson’s Jesse Aarons, a fifth-grader who experiences the abrupt death of his closest friend in "The Bridge to Terabithia," a book that is banned time and time again, and Sherman Alexie’s semi-autobiographical Arnold Spirit Jr., a Spokane Indian teenager who speaks so articulately, with such heartbreaking honesty and humor — because to find humor is to survive — of the death that surrounds him on his reservation in "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"— another favorite on banned books lists. Their stories are gifts in so many ways that the desire of some to keep them out of the hands of many puzzles me.

Awkward condolences are a fine, appreciated thing when coming from well-intentioned people, but man, death is an isolating thing, especially when you’re a little kid (Father’s Day in elementary school when we were asked each year to make a card for our dad? The worst). It’s difficult, when you’re seven or 10 or 12 to share feelings of grief and confusion and anger and guilt (oh, the guilt) with peers especially, but also adults. And what could another kid say in return anyway? So those feelings become secrets, the kind that are so large, the bearer becomes unsure she has the words to reveal them or the power to float those words in the air; and if she did, she wouldn’t know who could accept them.

Books, though. Books are not judgmental or unkind or well-meaning — they just are. They gave me the vocabulary I needed to both untangle my own feelings and share them with others. They were stories another person could read to know something about me, and stories I could read to know something about others. They were the author’s story and my story and someone else’s story — just stories upon stories upon stories.

Like I said: gifts.

You can find each of these books and thousands of others at Ames Public Library.

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